In the WINDOWS® environment, a process may access a system resource indirectly through the use of handles. A handle is a reference to an object representing a system resource. Among other uses, handles may be used to access an object by providing the address of the object in memory and the type of the resource that the object represents.
A process that wants to share access to a resource with another process may do so using the handle. The process must be able to duplicate an existing handle from their own context into the context of the other process with which they want to share access, and vice versa. Processes having this ability must fully trust one another. But in today's operating environment, processes often cannot fully trust one another, thereby limiting the usefulness of handles to share access to resources.